A partir de um contexto histórico em crescente complexificação e das limitações do pensamento analítico da Ciência Moderna, na compreensão de fenômenos processuais não lineares nem redutíveis a poucas variáveis de partes atomizadas, alcança-se o paradigma do pensamento sistêmico. Com fundamento neste paradigma, reflete-se sobre o design na contemporaneidade, suas múltiplas interações mercadológicas, sua função estratégica nas organizações e a necessidade de processos e gestão orientados pelo e para o design. Mediante uma revisão geral e sucinta das metodologias baseadas na epistemologia analítica, adentra-se no escopo principal deste artigo, que é tentar esboçar um método sistêmico de design estratégico. Palavras-chave: design estratégico, gestão de design, metodologia, pensamento sistêmico.

This paper is a contribution to the discussion on the ethical and political limitations of institutionalised, dominant design practices and on the need to rethink the ways in which they operate. It points out that institutionalised design processes act as a dispositive of power that not only capture and colonise forms of life, but that also shape territories, bodies and languages through normative models that are exogenous to them. This discussion is crucial when thinking about the role that design has played in nurturing current crises. This paper is an inquiry into the possibility of design practice that is not institutionalised either by sovereign designing designers or by subordinated designed users, but that constitutes itself according to dynamics where design emerges as a common project-process of creative possibilities of being and becoming. Crucial aspects for a non-institutionalised design practice are identified through the analysis of a design experience with communities in Rio de Janeiro favelas. This paper shows how this design experience is based on a design approach that, through discursive structures, dynamically supports and is informed by dissent and consensus, and by the interplay between resistance and counter-resistance.

Between 2004 and 2019, design graduate programs in Brazil granted PhD titles for 423 students. What were those theses about? What themes did they develop? Based on terms that emerges on their abstracts, this article adopts VOS Viewer bibliometric tool to, beyond its conventional usage possibilities, generate diagrams of the themes that are less recurrent in these abstracts, aiming to escape the dominant discussions in the design area. Therefore, the article advances in a semiotic classification and discussion about both the abstracts and the visualities found. Finally, these maps are understood as initial sensitizations, indexes that make emerging themes visible which can inspire and point out other avenues of design research to researchers in formation.

O presente artigo pretende investigar criticamente pontos considerados relevantes da teoria e do método do Design Sistêmico do professor italiano Luigi Bistagnino a partir da experiência de um workshop projetual com estudo de caso aplicado sobre o ecossistema criativo Vila Flores de Porto Alegre. Sua inflexão se dá principalmente sobre a insuficiência metodológica do Design Sistêmico em dar conta da complexidade do componente humano atuante em sistemas sociais abertos, dinâmicos, vivos, e portanto, dos produtos materiais e imateriais que caracterizam a semiosfera e a noosfera humana, comprometendo parcialmente a positividade dos resultados projetuais desta metodologia de design orientada para a sustentabilidade.